Posted on 10/08/2019 10:09:14 AM PDT by Red Badger
With a camera hidden in a hollowed-out Bible, peeking through the “O” of the word “Holy,” and a pair of rigged reading glasses, Scott Whitney secretly filmed the world behind bars, inside one of Florida’s notoriously dangerous prisons.
For four years, the 34-year-old convicted drug trafficker captured daily life on contraband cameras at the Martin Correctional Institution. He smuggled footage dating back to 2017 out of the prison, and titled the documentary “Behind Tha Barb Wire.” The video — given to the Miami Herald — allows the public to see with their own eyes the violence, rampant drug use and appalling conditions inside the prison.
As the Herald previously reported, Florida prisons have gone to great lengths to withhold video footage and other documents from news outlets, as well as family members of inmates who have died in custody.
To keep from releasing records, the agency has cited medical privacy laws and legal exemptions; sharing video footage specifically, it said, could jeopardize a facility’s security system and endanger prison personnel.
Whitney’s film, perhaps, underscored other reasons Florida’s Department of Corrections is keeping videos and records under wraps.
“We finna show y’all ... how we live in here that y’all ain’t seen,” said one inmate participating in the documentary.
From scene to scene, Whitney’s footage revealed an unkempt and decaying environment and demonstrated how little the officers care about their responsibilities or the inmates.
In one nighttime video narrated by Whitney in a hushed voice, a guard passed by his prison cell carrying a flashlight, yet never glanced inside. He remained oblivious to Whitney, who was openly filming at the time.
“They don’t check to see if we’re living, they don’t check to see if we’re safe,” Whitney said.
The video confirmed that homemade weapons and violence are hallmarks of life at Martin Correctional Institution, which the Herald said had 31 deaths in the past six years, including five homicides. Whitney modeled a makeshift stab-proof vest for the camera in one scene; in others, prisoners held a homemade knife and a “lock-and-belt weapon.”
The film documented mold covering the kitchen and mice popping in through crumbling walls. It also memorialized Hurricane Irma in 2017, when inmates from other prisons were transported to and housed at the facility, sleeping on the floor.
Most saliently, though, it captured the widespread drug use inside the prison.
“You got the war on drugs on the street, but once we get here you don’t care about the drugs,” he said to the camera.
Scene after scene showed inmates slumped over, stumbling to the ground, dragged across the floor and “twaking out.” One man lay face down in a pool of his own blood and another was rolled out on a gurney.
The culprit, Whitney said, was K2, a synthetic cannabinoid also known as “twak;” the Herald listed the drug as the most frequently confiscated contraband and the leading cause of overdose deaths.
Whitney continued, “You know you might not wake up any day you smoke that.”
The Florida Department of Corrections Office of Inspector General has opened an investigation into the video.
The agency wrote in an email to The Post on Monday: “The Department uses every tool at their disposal to mitigate violence and contraband within our institutions. Correctional Officers are diligent in their efforts to search inmates and common areas to eradicate weapons and remove dangerous and illegal contraband. At the forefront of our priorities is an agencywide effort to recruit and retain correctional officers statewide.”
Inmate-produced footage is extraordinarily rare, even more so when its trafficked out of a prison, Ron McAndrew, a prison consultant and former warden, told the Herald.
While gruesome and graphic photographs from inside prisons in Alabama and Mississippi were leaked and posted online earlier this year, the first example of footage from a contraband phone making its way online, he said, was in July at another Florida facility. A prison captain and two guards were arrested and fired after a video of officers beating an inmate was uploaded to YouTube.
Under Florida law, contraband cellphones can result in new felony charges and add prison time to an inmate’s sentence. Or, there’s the threat of solitary confinement — a fate Whitney has experienced, the Herald reported.
On September 19, Jordyn Gilley-Nixon, a prison reform advocate and former inmate, uploaded two minutes of Whitney’s footage to YouTube. Since then, prison officials have housed Whitney in isolation. If he’s released from solitary confinement, Whitney, whose drug trafficking sentence ends in 2040, promised to continue filming.
Many times contraband is brought in by civilian staff that work at the prisons. I can’t tell you how many times in my 25 years that civilian staff were fired because they were involved with inmates, or were bringing stuff into them. And, I can’t tell you how many times we found screwdrivers and other tools on units, and other common areas that we discovered had never been reported missing from civilian workshops. Each shop had its own sets of tools, and a shadow board for each tool, and each tool was inscribed with the specific number assigned for that shop. In order to get a tool, the inmate would have to turn over his ID card, and he would only get the ID back when he turned the tool back in. There were plenty of times that instead of reporting a tool missing so we could search for it, the civilian instructor would simply go to Sears, or some other place, buy the same brand tool, inscribe it with the number it was supposed to have, and hang it in the empty space on the shadow board, and pretend nothing was wrong. And when you’d confront them with the tool from their shop that was found, they couldn’t explain how it had happened.
Are the guards the primary drug dealers?
In a perfect world, there wouldn't be, but inmates swallow drugs, or shove them up their ass that they get on visits, and unless you specifically see it, it's a done deal. You can't accompany them into the bathroom in the visiting room, and when you have a large visiting room full of inmates, and their visitors every weekend, you can't see everything that happens 100% of the time. There's only a certain number of officers assigned to the visiting room. Sometimes you're lucky if you have two officers, and the State won't approve overtime to beef up security presence. We can't frisk visitors, and we can't frisk civilian employees, who are just as capable of bringing in drugs and other contraband as uniformed staff is.
When a tip is given that an inmate may have swallowed a balloon of drugs on a visit, there is a specific procedure that has to be be followed. In the end, no pun intended, the inmate will be put in a special housing cell, and an officer will sit outside his cell, keeping the inmate in view at all times. The water will be shut off in the cell so he can't flush the toilet, and after 3 days (I think that may be the time limit), if he hasn't crapped by then, he's sent back to his unit. If he does crap, the officer has to search through his crap to find whatever he swallowed. And if he has swallowed drugs, he's then charged with possession of a controlled substance, but he's usually only charged based on prison rules, not outside criminal charges.
No they just close their eyes for a price.
Thank you. I've been away from the job now for almost 16 years, but there are plenty of things you never forget, especially when it comes to security. I used to tell people it was a great job...where else could you go into work every day and be entertained...and get paid for it? :-)
Retired Fire department after 35 years. I understand.
I bet you saw some things during your 35 years with the Fire Department. You put your life on the line every day, so thank you that, and I hope you have a happy, healthy, and long retirement.
It would be almost impossible to maintain a sterile environment within a prison, with the only exception being the Super Max. However, we should expect public employees to not contribute to the contraband flow into prisons.
So far there's no fool-proof way of doing that because of the different levels of security that prisons are assigned. Other than only building Super Max prisons, and keeping inmates locked in their cells 24/7, with no contact with anyone other than officers, no contact visits, not even with their lawyers, no packages allowed to be brought in on visits, no packages allowed to be sent into the facility from family or friends, no catalog orders by inmates, no commissary buys, no phone calls, no mail, no vocational or educational classes, no religious services, no outside volunteers coming in for AA, or other group meetings, no access to library, law library or recreational programs, no outside medical trips, or hospital stays, no funeral visits, no nothing. And what do you think the courts would do with that? All the things inmates are allowed to have access to were all brought about by the courts.
I’ve been there , you can get through it and carry - on . You seem to miss the fact that our jails are far superior than most.....and how do you think you would be as a guard ? Day in day out dealing with the s __t they have to? They see and deal with the worst DAILY......what type of attitude should they have ? Walk a mile in their shoes ...OH and most importantly once you serve your time make it a priority to not go back. I deal with re-entry guys and you get hardened after a while as to how many don’t see the light that is only a heartbeat away but the ones that find it makes it all worth while.
Got a family friend who is an ex-prison officer. He states that prisons should be well staffed and well run, not brutal, anarchistic hellholes dominated by the meanest criminals or sadistic guards. It shouldn’t be a brutal enviroment dominated by violence, otherwise such an enviroment becomes normalised even for prisoners who didn’t go in like that in the first place, and when they are released, normal people will have to rub along with people who have had to survive in an enviroment where perceived slights have to be responded to with violence because that is what their dysfunctional enviroment has taught them. .
Personally, I’d hate to be a UK prison officer. Cuts have reduced manpower to dangerous levels, the prisons are overloaded with spice and other drugs and the staffing levels are such that when violence is threatened they often have to hide away and thus allow a dysfunctional enviroment to flourish in which the prison guards are not in control but the violent, hardned criminals are. Back in the 60s-70s, when my family friend first started out, the prison staff where in charge, and they made sure the prisoners knew it, and drugs etc wheren’t anywhere near as available as they are now.
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